


rustler

by sweetwatersong



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, First Meetings, Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-11
Updated: 2018-11-11
Packaged: 2019-08-20 02:01:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16546679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetwatersong/pseuds/sweetwatersong
Summary: A stranger shows up the day before the drive, riding a bare-boned buckskin with a long face and scars that ripple under his shaggy mustang coat. She calls herself Romanoff, wears a hat that shades cold and weary eyes with its sweat-stained brim, sits like she was born on a horse in a duster that slips over scuffed boots when it flaps in the autumn wind.





	rustler

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Crazy4Orcas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crazy4Orcas/gifts).



> For crazy4orcas, who prompted Clint/Natasha and a horse AU.

A stranger shows up the day before the drive, riding a bare-boned buckskin with a long face and scars that ripple under his shaggy mustang coat. She calls herself Romanoff, wears a hat worn that shades cold and weary eyes with its sweat-stained brim, sits like she was born on a horse in a duster that slips over scuffed boots when it flaps in the autumn wind. The Boss hires her for the trip since they’re two riders short - and Clint, watching her from where he’s working with his sore-footed bay mare, wonders if there’s a reason those reliable old hands didn’t make it. But he keeps his mouth shut because no one argues with the Boss, not in this outfit, and when they start to move seven hundred head of cattle out across the plains the silent rider and her yellow-toothed pony go out with them.

Sometimes he wishes his gut wasn’t right about these kinds of things.

-

“I’m not sorry,” Romanoff snaps at him, gray eyes hard and defiant in the shade of her hat, an accent sliding around the edges of her words that he can’t place. Around them the cattle low and moan, stumbling to their knees or to a halt in the grass, exhausted. “I did what I had to.”

Clint looks at her, remembering how more than one shot had been aimed in her direction, and wonders if those she has betrayed good men to have orders to take her down as well. All he does know is that she knows he’s trying to decide if he can believe her, can risk another threat at his back when so many lie in front of him. But his mare is dancing under his seat, pinning her ears back unhappily at the howls coming up over the ridge, and Clint realizes he’s never really had a choice.

“You take the left side, I’ll take the right,” he tell her, switching the shotgun to his right hand and pointing it at the ground instead of her heart. She nods shortly, her buckskin already pivoting on his hind feet to launch himself through the straggling cattle before Clint’s mare can do the same.

It feels like an endless moment while the wind whips at his face, tearing away the distressed groans of the cows and even the calls of the men riding to steal them, to hunt down the drivers and murder them in cold blood for colder cash. The bay swings wide around the edge of the hill she crested only a minute earlier, flying over the trampled grass and racing back towards the bodies of men he worked beside for five seasons or more - and then his pursuers are in his line of sight, riding up the ridge in a line, laughing and urging the blood-thirsty mutts to run before them.

He takes down one of the outlaws in his first shot, reloads and puts a hole through another with the second. Then his mare is crashing into a third’s mount, slamming it sideways so he can bring the butt around and bash it into a grease-stained temple; as the man falls to the ground, limp and as good as dead, Clint jabs the paint in the rump and sends it panicking into the fourth horse. There are shots from his left, from the direction Romanoff should be coming in from, but he can’t look because the mad dogs are turning, snarling, their teeth long and glistening in the sun. They're half-wild, to go after cattle as they have, and he doesn’t have time to wonder if they could listen to any command he might give. He puts down the three in his sight with the Colt tucked in front of his knee rest, and it’s not just the gun-smoke that’s acrid in his nose, on his tongue.

When the chaos clears and the bay swings around under the pressure from his knees, he sees Romanoff riding towards them, one hand clamped over a soaking wet wound on her arm.

“That’s all,” she says shortly, a trail of bodies left behind her. He counts, sees the neat holes in chests and heads and hearts, and doesn’t feel the need to check for signs of life. Instead he nods shortly and wheels the bay back the way the outlaws came, pulling her up short by the side of the first collapsed cattle hand he comes across.

Clint doesn’t know how long it is until he rocks back on his heels from the last man accounted for, wiping away sweat on his forehead with the back of a bloody hand, and accepts the canteen Romanoff offers him. He can tell out of the corner of his eye that she’s gathered more of the rustlers’ belongings; must have been doing so, to provide him with makeshift bandages for human injuries and ammunition to put down the horses too injured to let live. Then his thoughts pause while he takes one swallow, another, a third.

The water is lukewarm and leathery and in the pounding heat of the sun a miracle in and of itself, like Jimmy’s potential to pull through, Canty surviving his gelding falling on him. But it has to be rationed, has to be measured out carefully now. He lets the remaining water slosh in the canteen as he squints up at Romanoff, gauging the way the lowering sun splashes light across her face. Her hard expression hasn’t changed, but she’s here. Still here. And that’s another kind of miracle.

“So what comes next?”

“I'm sorry, you are asking me?” She replies, the question sarcastic and bitter while the corner of her mouth twists wryly. “I told you, did I not? That is everyone. If you are as smart as I think you are you will round up the herd, put the two who are still alive on the horses that are left and ride back to town tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah, could do that.” Four days out from the outpost with at least six, maybe six and a half hundred head of cattle to wrangle and only two wounded men to help? Instead of continuing that thought Clint tips his head towards her wound. It’s been wrapped up over the coat with a crumpled bandana that it’s already bled through, although the blood has dried to a shade that matches her hair. He wonders if that is intended as a warning. "Does that need looking at?”

She peels away the bandana, freeing blood to run down the leather in fresh red rivulets. It’s better than he thought at first, more of a graze as long as it’s missed the bone. “I’ll be fine.”

He waits in silence as she shrugs off the coat enough to wrap a new rag around her wound, tying it with her teeth. She never once looks to him for help; he never offers it. When the coat is back on and the pained look has slid off her face he looks up at her.

“Ride back with us.”

Her eyes go sharp and flat and hard. “I’ve done all I can.”

Clint can’t manage enough strength to get angry, not with Cook lying trampled in the grass four feet away. "I figure that whoever you owe is still back in some cushy town, sitting fat and pretty while his hired hands came out here to rob us. Maybe even the town that we last rode out from. But the next post west is another six days away. So it seems to me that you either go back and face him, maybe with some help, or you keep running.”

“I don’t need your advice.”

“No, but I need you.” He stands and ignores how she tenses, shifting her weight away subtly. “I can’t get us back to town without your help. We’ll make it a trade. I’ll take down your boss in exchange for losing mine.”

“You didn’t even like him.”

He nods. “Yeah, I didn’t. And he wasn’t a good man. That's not a problem, for me, seeing as I’m not either. But I am what you might call a survivor, Romanoff, and I’m pretty sure you are too. This is your best bet.”

She snorts, soft and harsh. “You’re a poor bet, Barton.”

She's not wrong. Jimmy is still sitting close to the top of the ridge, holding himself together through sheer will. Canty has hauled himself into the saddle of Marshal’s gelding and is heading towards the small knot of loose horses and mules that has formed off to one side. On the air comes the distant lowing of the cattle, lost and aimless.

“Maybe, but I’m still standing.”

Clint whistles and his mare, planted a cautious three paces away from Romanoff’s mustang and watching him with a wary eye, pricks her ears and trudges towards him. He grabs the saddle horn and swings up into the saddle, working out how long they have to round up the cattle before they need to use the damaged supplies from Cook’s wagon to start a fire and make dinner.

“Offer’s still on the table, Romanoff.”

She doesn’t reply as he turns his mare’s head towards the task at hand. But when the knot of cattle he’s cornered begin to string out away from the herd a streak of faded gold turns them back to him, leather and hide and a flash of dark red, blood red, running free across the pale glory of the open land.


End file.
